The continued advancement of technology has made many aspects of day to day teaching far easier! Prepping lessons, creating assignments, filing grades all happen at the touch of a few keys. When it comes to assessments and evaluations of students technology has continued to develop, offering far more ease of use, consistency across classrooms and has even improved the sharing and communication of student progress with students and their families.
When I first began teaching, our report cards were created using a FileMaker Pro database of comments we had to manually create, input, copy and paste into every report. A huge advancement considering that 3 years earlier they were still being handwritten!! Now, however, we have electronic systems in place for the collection of data, like PM Benchmarks and DRA levels and the reporting program our schools are using bank comments -personal or shared, allow multiple teachers access to multiple classes and flood comments to all students who have achieved a certain grade level.
The introduction of programs like Google classroom or Sesame io have allowed teachers to streamline assignments and the sharing of feedback. Building in student accountability, responsibility and the ability for Parents to access grades and completed tasks has proven extremely beneficial for our intermediate teachers in the last year and they have seen greater engagement in students when it comes to tracking and self-evaluating how they are doing in any given class.
There are always a few pitfalls. How do you support staff who are not comfortable problem solving with technology? How do you engage parents who are not interested in online communication about their child's progress? How do school boards best support a wide range of available programs or do they dictate which ones can and cannot be used? And, there are always a few improvements that would help -like programs that allow parents to securely access their child's information or a system that would easily allow the transfer of already collected marks for a student who may be moving, a way to connect rubrics directly to Ontario curriculum, auto-send features to expedite the sharing of grades to name a few. Halton is beginning to implement a program called Edsby that will address many of these improvements and I am curious to see how it all unfolds!!
All I can say is that I am grateful for the advancements in technology and that the days of carbon paper report cards are gone!!
Technology has come far I agree. Improving the communications of student progress will eventually be accessible to all concerned as we advance. I believe if we are going to start small, having teachers post a blog everyday to inform parents of status, for example....the letter d was introduced or we read a story called The Paper Bag Princes today. My daughter has not been impressed with the non-communication at Charlotte's school and I believe skeptic parents like her would be satisfied. Those not interested would not go to the link.
ReplyDeleteI was looking at the google link you posted ...i am a bit nervous about signing my board's information...do you think i should be if i don't have permission?...but sesame is terrific ...thanks so much!
Many years ago, when I first started using Google in the classroom, it was my assessment practice that changed the most. I remember, 2008, working using Google Docs (all my students were under age of course....oops) and I had the students use the docs collaboratively for peer editing. It was amazing! I also could look at the revision history and see how many and what edits were done. This told me so much about the student. As your post explains here...we have come so far since then. Another tool for asses
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